Family

Although I never idealized my parents’ relationship, I did admire it, and believe in it, for my whole youth. The divorce, which is ongoing, has been extremely venomous and melodramatic. It has revealed painful and ugly truths about both of my parents, about my childhood, and about me. All of the assumptions on which I have based my life — not my life in some grand sense, but just my daily getting out of bed and going forth life — are shattered.

… Even that doesn’t quite get at it. The disillusionment is more primitive. It’s as if all my life I was a giraffe, happily munching on Saharan mimosa, and then one morning I woke up and realized I was a penguin. Forget the identity crisis — just get me out of the freaking desert.

Anyway, I am not writing to you about any of the particular issues that have arisen for me as a result of my collision with the karmic dump truck. After several months of convulsive grief I am starting to pick my way through the rubble. But I am really, really raw. Having always thought of myself as an emotionally intelligent person, I am shocked and disoriented by my sudden inability to predict my own reactions to daily stimuli. The other day I started crying when someone casually wished me good luck getting home in the snow. And while half of me was crying, the other half was all calm and perplexed, like, “Why are you crying?” It’s not just crying at little things, it’s also not crying at big things, and realizing I am walking along in a bitter fury and not being able to think of a single thing that happened to instigate it.

My basic cognitive processing time has also plummeted. If someone says something to me, like “I had cucumber sandwiches for lunch,” I squint in at the words like they are inexplicable ancient artifacts, and by the time I have remembered what a cucumber is they are already on a whole other food group.

But the worst is what happens when I find myself on the verge of any tiny moment of intimacy with someone, like a friend or a family member. When someone gets too close to me (and I seem to have a very low threshold for what constitutes “too close”) I feel violent anxiety and the desperate need to get away. I also feel revulsion toward the other person. This hurts like hell, because at the same time as I am panicking, I am thinking, “I know I love the person and I know I probably actually need them.” I have never had anything like this kind of reaction to intimacy before in my life, but I guess it makes sense that when your heart is broken it’s also not usable.

In order to deal with all of these symptoms, I have been trying to incorporate some extra spiritual practice into my life. The problem is that I can’t find anything that feels right. I was not raised in any religious tradition, and I have searched off and on for a text or a philosophy or a set of teachings or a belief community that might suit me. I even have a master’s degree in divinity.

What I am saying is that, although I am basically your run-of-the-mill, overly educated secular humanist, it is not as though I have not been open and curious about faith. I have always practiced prayer, but now that’s not enough. I need something more. I tried attending various churches and temples, I tried therapy, I tried meditation, I tried memorizing poems I love and saying them to myself mantra-like, and various other things. I still do some of them occasionally, but none of them really help to anchor me, and I can’t bring myself to just choose one and do it rigorously in the hopes that habit will itself be the anchor. Anyway, I think I have enough habit and rigor in my life.

If anyone came to me with this dilemma and asked for advice I would tell them to volunteer in their community. In the past, that has been the main spiritual balm for me. But my current profession is a very hands-on type of public service, and so I more or less do volunteer work for a living. I don’t have time to add another commitment. I feel like I need me a fierce Old Testament God, one of those “the Lord is with me as a dread warrior” types. Or else I need a Jesus or a Buddha or a prophet of some sort to surrender all of this to. But Jesus and Buddha don’t do it for me, Cary. Can you point me to a prophet?

Not a Dancer Anymore

Dear Former Dancer,

You are not going to die from this. But you are on the fritz.

When a machine goes on the fritz, someone puts a sign on it.

Someone should put a sign on you.

It would say, “I am on the fritz. Please do not bang on me or unplug me or tip me back and forth.”

You will be OK. But you are not OK right now. You have never encountered such a powerful mess before. Everything has not gone haywire like this before.

After a certain age we have it mostly wired. We have a basic understanding; we know mostly what people’s motives are and how they can be expected to act. We have a repertoire of getting-over-it behaviors and thinking-it-through behaviors and self-care behaviors and refresh-the-soul-and-body behaviors.

But then comes the tsunami. You don’t expect it or know how to deal with it.

I get the feeling that you are not used to being on the fritz. I get the feeling you are very good at maintaining. So I suggest you first let go of the expectation that one particular solution is going to work right away. Try instead accepting the possibility that nothing is going to work right away.

Nothing is going to fix it. You’re going to be on the fritz for a while.

How to be out of order and still perform our daily activities?

I think that if you acquired an ally, in the form of a guru or a sponsor or a therapist, and just committed to meeting regularly through this period, you could get through this, one painful step at a time. Assume that this will be a long, grueling, taxing, embarrassing, at times humiliating period of less-than-optimal performance and baffling discomfort. Pick someone to go through it with. Pay them if necessary. Make a commitment of a year. Keep a record of how the situation is changing. It may continue to get worse for a while. Eventually it will start to get better. Just keep track of how your condition changes. Pay attention. Observe with interest.

I think the thing about the Old Testament God is an interesting metaphor that we all recognize but I think it is a metaphor for something very real. I think it is a metaphor for something you have inside you. I think it is a spirit you are talking about, the warrior spirit, the survival spirit, which is not graceful but is strong.

I think you can make contact with that spirit that you mention — that all-powerful, fierce, Old Testament spirit. You can dance it. It is within you. It is the survival instinct. It is your muse and your life force. If you contact this all-powerful force within you, this force that will not be cowed, this force that does not care how it survives but will get through anything, you can awaken it and it will help you power your way through this awful, grief-laden, soul-devouring mess. Address it and see what it says. Dance to it. If because of your injuries you cannot physically dance to it, then dance to it in your head. Use your kinesthetic memory and move to it so it recognizes you; in this way, dance your pain. Write to it. Write to it and let it write back to you. Visualize it. Ask it for help. Make a pact with it. Note the form it takes. It may be a bear. It may even take the form of a bearded prophet. I predict that it will address you and guide you.

Just don’t ask it for a quick answer or it may shrug its shoulders and turn away. It’s going to need time to work its magic.

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My family never tires of doing the math: When I’m in my late 30s, he will be turning 60; when I’m in my late 50s (my mother’s current age), he will be approaching 80! And then I will be all alone in my old age, when I need a partner the most.

But after I listen to their forecast of illness and doom, I return to my life and am reminded of how happy he makes me, in the now. He’s the kind of person who insists on taking care of his friends’ cats every time they go away; who remembers the birthdays of all of his nieces and nephews (he doesn’t have kids of his own); who doesn’t like to talk much but always says hello to the doorman and to the neighbors in the elevator; who goes out early in the morning and shovels snow for a neighborhood school where he takes classes. He puts the same care, respect and attention into our daily interactions. He loves me fiercely, and I’ve never felt so happy or safe in a relationship.

Don’t think that our relationship is based on the stereotypical pursuit of money and beauty. I recently graduated from an Ivy League college and plan to get an MBA. He never went to college and has been working with his hands his whole life. We both recognize that I’ll likely have greater earning power in the future. But our having different backgrounds is actually a great thing. We never run out of things to talk about, and we appreciate the different things that each of us brings to the table.

Despite our different backgrounds, we fit well together. We both grew up as outsiders in our respective communities and have similar sensibilities and values. We share a passion for the same sport, for which we train together almost every day (that’s how we met). We communicate easily with each other and have never even come close to having a fight. And when one of us tells a joke, odds are that the other is the only one laughing when everyone else would stare with confused faces. In the six months we’ve been dating, things have fallen in place so easily that I have pretty much forgotten the age gap.

But not quite. My family’s prediction of future misery and resentment for me is always lurking in the shadows. Every time I talk with my mother, she mercilessly shines a glaring light on the monster, and it scares me. Recently, my traditional Asian family has called upon the ancient duty of filial piety and commanded me to end this relationship. It’s for your own good, they tell me. You can always find someone your own age to love.

I’m angry that my family is ordering me to make a very personal decision. At the same time I wonder, what if they are right? What if I fight for this relationship and alienate my family, only to find myself caring for an aging partner and young kids when I’m still building my career? Is our happiness now — and this overwhelming sense that “this is right” in every other way — worth taking this risk? And if the answer is yes, how do I explain this to my family?

Please help, Cary. I would really appreciate your thoughts.

Torn

Dear Torn,

I suggest you take more time with this. You’ve only been dating for six months.

It’s kind of odd, don’t you think, that in thinking about the future your family sees only one scenario, the tragically poor widow, bereft of companionship and burdened with a younger woman’s labors? No one seems to have mentioned that the very genius of planning is that you can plan for any future. You do not have to plan just for the catastrophic future of your worst imaginings. You can plan calmly and reasonably for a future in which one mate will retire sooner, age sooner and probably die sooner.

If you are planning to get an MBA then you must be acquainted with methods of estate planning and investment strategies. It seems a straightforward exercise to consider how an estate would be planned to take into account the age difference, as well as the differences in earnings that you have already mentioned.

Such a rational approach ignores what is really going on: For a variety of reasons, your family is fearful and upset.

Think how they must fear the awkwardness of their daughter having a husband who is only a few years younger than they are. This is not what they were expecting. They were expecting a young man upon whom they could look as a son. You do not say if this man is Asian, but if he is not, that introduces another difficulty for your family. They will have to adjust to the idea of a man who does not look like them or act like them, and who is nearly their age; they will have to adjust to the idea, if you have children, of children who look blended.

Speaking of children: Does he want to have children with you? Can he? Why does he have no kids? What about you? Do you want kids? Are you sure? Have you thought about it deeply?

There are a million other issues this raises. I have looked at them and thought about them but it is the larger picture that I want to talk about:

The world is changing. Your family must know this. That does not mean they are happy about it. They may feel a deep sense of loss of heritage and destiny. Who knows how they feel? Imagine what a comfort it must be to people of traditional cultures to look backward and forward in time and see in either direction an unbroken procession of people who look just this way and live just this way, and who far into the future will continue to look just this way and live just this way. How beautiful and reassuring that must be! Who would easily relinquish such a vision?

So please, do not scorn or disregard what your family is going through. It is not inconsequential or shallow.

But this is not just about you, either. You are awash in a great historical struggle. On one side are the myriad forces of globalism and modernity, threatening to wash away thousands of years of cultural continuity with a few clicks of a mouse. And frankly, as a romantic, individualistic, secular Westerner, I do think the future belongs to the pioneers and inventors, the scientists and entrepreneurs who will create a new world but in doing so will lay to waste the fragile ancient world that birthed us.

It seems to me that the world goes the way of the seafarer bringing strange germs to aboriginals, the way of strange new tools and tongues, and that we must and will increasingly mix and blend ourselves into fractal mirrors of each other, and learn to shepherd global flows of capital and genes, and since we must adapt or perish, why not fling ourselves joyfully, head-first into this raging and inevitable future, instead of being dragged into it by our heels?

You can’t reasonably expect your family to embrace this. To them it must look like just so much carnage and outrage. Nevertheless, you are part of a great, global awakening.

So think on these things and think about how the world is changing and where you want to be in that world, and think, too, about the magic of love and how it can, indeed, if given the chance, at times, conquer everything.

Whether it’s worth taking the risk may finally depend on who you are and what cultural system is most deeply embedded in your psyche. Are you a Westerner at heart? Are you a part of the Western romantic tradition, the tradition of individualism and love conquering all? Do you believe in the power of romantic love to overcome social obstacles? Do you? Are you that person? Or are you more deeply, at heart, your mother’s daughter?

Whom do you belong to? Do you belong to yourself, to the state, to your family, to God? How can you know? The answers are of course plural. You belong to your family and to yourself, to the state, to your friends and to your God if you think of the imponderable in such terms.

In any case, you don’t have to marry this man right away.

So take your time. See how things develop. Bring him around and see how the family responds. Maybe in time they will warm up to him, discover their similarities and overlook the differences.

Maybe.

But anyway just wanted to say that best as I can tell from the first name on the email address the following letter comes from a person of the female gender.

That is all. Except yes, I understand that we are in a rapidly changing environment genderwise. Let’s just let the changes happen as they happen. We don’t have to be proving ourselves to each other how sensitive we are to cultural shifts constantly. If you are busy felling trees or making advertisements or fighting a war or creating new kinds of facial makeup and don’t have the time or inclination to follow every small shift in gender politics I think that’s probably healthy.

But maybe it’s a youth thing too. Like following the pop charts and who’s in and out. It’s a sharply transitory collection of fast-moving data.

I try to be sensitive to individuals and their complexities. But I like my old, well-used tools, words like “husband” and “wife,” with all their old, cartoonish associations, like “castle” and “horse.”

Forgive me my crankiness. I got woken up too many times during the night by the old dog making his nervous, coughing complaints. Plus this warm, dry weather we’ve having in California in January is just spooky and a little creepy and scary. It’s got us all a little on edge.

So could I please just for heaven’s sake just get on to the letter now?

OK. I could.

Dear Cary,

I feel so frustrated. I’m naturally an introvert, so it’s hard for me to make friends and I feel like I have no one to talk to and no one to hang around with.

My entire life I’ve hated my dad. He’s cruel, treats me like a possession or a pet that he reluctantly finances but doesn’t really care about, and for a long time, when I was younger, we had physical fights as well. My older brother got the worst of that and my younger brother got some of it as well, and as a result, we’re all messed up and can’t hold our tempers. We all can’t stand losing or being “wrong” because our entire lives we’ve been taught we’re less than my dad, we don’t know anything, and that we’re always wrong. We were physically weaker so we always lost. Now this puts a strain on my relationship with my siblings because none of us can back down.

My mom and I are best friends but she lets everything go by. She’s always said we should give in and she’ll talk sense to my dad later, but stupid pride has always kept me from being able to do that. Something inside of me just won’t give in when he’s yelling at me like I’m worthless. She never gives a firm ruling in anything, even when my siblings and I would have arguments, and always wants to “compromise” to avoid confrontation. I understand where she’s coming from, as her dad is exactly like mine and she married young into the cycle. She’s lived in that environment her entire life and now she just wants to pretend it doesn’t exist.

I’m 21 years old and a senior in college, so I get a break by living on campus during the week and only coming home to work and attend church on the weekends. But during holidays and the summer it’s really hard for me to be in close proximity with the rest of my family. Especially now that my best friend, who is Mormon, has gone on a year and a half mission where the only contact she is allowed to have is through written letters, I’ve been feeling even more isolated. I don’t belong anywhere. Nothing I ever do is worth it. Nothing is ever good enough and I feel frustrated and helpless. I know I should just man up and move out, but the thought of supporting myself completely while finishing my degree seems so impossible that I tell myself I’d rather live at home and suffer than move out. It’s weak and pathetic, I know, but I won’t move out.

I just don’t know what to do anymore. I worry I’ll be alone forever because I’m scared to trust anyone for fear they’ll be just like my father and grandfather. I’m tired of being controlled. I’m depressed. I feel like my life has no purpose, like it means nothing.

Lost and confused,

Always Last

Dear Always Last,

So here are some things. So you are going to have a lot of strong feelings from this for a long time and they are going to be with you and so you are going to need to get used to them and not fight them or fear them because they are just feelings and feelings are not facts, even though that is a cliche and even though feelings feel a lot like facts. In fact feelings sometimes feel more like facts than facts do. But the facts are different, and college is actually a great place to begin sorting all that out. The facts are that you have a certain kind of father and a certain kind of relationship that results in certain kinds of feelings. And because the feelings are your feelings you naturally treat them as important. And that’s fine. That’s good. They are important. But they are not the only thing there is.

The idea as you grow into adulthood is to get big enough inside for all your feelings. Take a deep breath. Expand. Expand to take in all your feelings. You can hold them all. Maybe sit and meditate for a while and let all your feelings be. You can’t act on all of them all at once. You can’t do anything about them a lot of the time. So your task is to learn to walk around with them, letting them be there, asking them what they mean, asking them what they’re telling you to do, making friends with them.

Some of these feelings are telling you important things, like that it was wrong for your dad to treat you that way, and like you are not the person your dad treated you as, and like it is unfortunate in the extreme that you had to go through that with him. But these feelings will also tell you things that are just not true, like that nothing you ever do is worth it, or nothing is ever good enough. Those things are just not true. They might feel true but they’re not empirically true, and what you are in college for is to get comfortable with the empirical, because it will save your life. The empirical is outside you. It is bigger than you. Empirically speaking, much of what you go on to do will absolutely be worth it, and much of what you do will absolutely be good enough. For instance, your writing to me was worth it and good enough. It was definitely good enough. Your just walking around today is good enough. Your just being kind to your friends and family and getting through the day is good enough.

There is a lot about your life that is worth it and good enough. So some of what your dad left you with is all these helpless feelings and untrue statements. So your task as you get to be 22 and 23 will be to sort out the phenomenologically true statements about your feelings, like, I feel angry toward my dad and I feel hopeless and sad, from the empirically untrue statements like nothing I do will ever be good enough and I am a failure and I am unloved.

You are loved. You are good enough. You just had a dad who didn’t treat you right. It’s not your fault. It’s his fault. Your job for the next few years is to routinely work toward overcoming the bad and stupid ideas he left you with. “I’m not good enough” is a bad and stupid idea and it needs to be replaced with empirically sensible ideas such as “I can do the things I set out to do” and “Good enough for what?” by the way.

OK?

You have a whole life to live. Your feelings are going to be there and sometimes they are going to be uncomfortable and you are going to want to punch people and that is fine. That is nothing to be afraid of. Eventually things are going to make more sense and you are going to sort things out. So think of it this way. When you were 8 you had feelings and you had to learn to sort them out and you did. You did well. You got through being 8. It wasn’t easy. Eight never is. Eight is tough. It’s a lot of work moving on to 9 but you did it. And then 10. You did 10. No easy one either. Imagine. All those years you got through already. So now you’re 21 and you’re going to get through this one as well. And you are going to be angry at times and it’s scary but you are going to get through it.

And you are going to learn to identify the various feelings you have from growing up with your dad and learn to know what they are and where they come from and make decisions anyway and live your life anyway. Like this trust thing you have. You are going to see this distrust come up and you are going to know what it is and even though you know that your dad is only one man in the universe and every man is not your dad this trust thing is going to come up. So when it comes up you are going to learn to say to yourself and possibly to the man in question, you know, after growing up with my dad and all, I have this trust thing, just so you know.

So that is my letter to you this morning, on this strange and irritability-producing young morning.

Oh, and another thing: It goes by really fast, so pay attention to the good moments. Have as many good moments as you can. You’ll enjoy remembering them later.

My hometown was always a bit small for me. I always craved traveling and living (for a time at least) in a big city. As a result, I’ve moved from a city of about 500,000 to one of almost 3 million. Most of my family has stayed back home, 90 percent of whom live in the same state and 90 percent of those in the same city. They can and do see each other pretty much weekly. My work schedule and finances allow that maybe a few times a year. I talk with my parents weekly, but rarely anyone else, especially my sisters (two of whom still live in our hometown). Recently my grandmother had a heart attack (albeit a mild one, thankfully), and I found myself guilty that I wasn’t home like most of my family to be there. Though I must admit, part of this guilt came from feeling like fellow family members were a bit resentful that I wasn’t home either. Also recently, I learned from my dad that his father is still suffering from severe depression from the death of my grandmother three years ago, and he asked me to give him a call, if only to say hi.

I can catch an earful sometimes from my parents about not talking enough to people I should (especially my grandparents), and I feel genuinely guilty for not doing so, but another part of me just doesn’t make the time to do so. I can be told I should call so-and-so just to say hi, but I find myself never consciously making the time to do so. I love my parents and sisters and grandparents and family, but I just don’t ever make time to call and say hi. To be fair, I never really make the time to call just to chat with anyone, but why can’t I find the motivation to do so with my family?

My family also tells me that my nephew, who is particularly close to me, misses me a lot and he wishes that I lived back home again. To which I can only shrug. I like my life in the big city and being on my own, but it’s clear that I’m breaking with the tradition of my family of having a close-knit (again, literally and figuratively) relationship. I feel guilty for living 1,300 miles away; I feel guilty when I have to fly back after a holiday visit; but most of all I feel guilty that I don’t have the urge to talk to them on a semi-regular basis and that sometimes I out-and-out dread it. I have no reason really to resent my family. They’ve never done anything that would make me want to disown them, but I feel incredibly selfish that I sometimes find talking to them a chore (and I don’t know if family members think of me as selfish as well); that I’m not as close to everyone as my sisters are; and that I would often prefer to spend more time alone or with friends than with family. Why do I find interaction with them to be a chore sometimes? Why can’t I be the family member that everyone else seems to be? What’s wrong with me?

The Black Sheep

Dear Black Sheep,

I suggest you do two things, one long-term and one short-term. In the short term: Call your nephew. Just call. It’s that time of year.

In the long term … well, let’s just stick with the short term a little more. In the short term: Make the calls you have been putting off. Be honest. Pick somebody, one person in your family that you can be honest with. Maybe your nephew is too young to get into all this with. So maybe your nephew is not the person to get honest with. But get honest with somebody. Pick somebody in your family you can be honest with. Call that person. If it’s hard to make the call, say it’s hard. If it’s hard to be living so far away, say it’s hard to be living so far away. If you feel bad for not being more in touch, say you feel bad for not being more in touch.

You can do these things. You’ll feel better after you do. It’s the holiday season. Lots of people are having a hard time. A few people are just filled with holiday good cheer and making everyone else feel like losers, but most are neither ecstatic nor depressed, just trying to get stuff done and put a good face on it. Many people are seeing family members they don’t see often, in social settings that are novel and fast-changing; certain people are going to be overwhelmed by too much contact; others are going to be impatient with the ones who are overwhelmed; certain people will be having surprisingly strong reactions to stuff for no apparent reason and only later will be sorting out why they had these reactions. Dread of certain conversations will be rampant. Certain people will drink too much and make confessions. In others, long-held resentments will flower. Feelings will be hurt accidentally, even by people with the best of intentions. The young, hip and beautiful will sneak out, have their pleasures, and radiate derision and boredom toward the rest. Many will feel alone even when surrounded by love. Most of us will somehow get through it.

You’re not bad. Maybe you’re different. But that doesn’t make you bad. Maybe you have higher hopes and dreams than the others. That doesn’t make you bad. You’re following your dream.

What can you tell your family members? You can tell them that you love them and miss them and you’re following your dream. You’re doing what you have to do.

And, long-term, I guess the thing is, and this goes for pretty much all the letters I’ve ever answered: Long-term, for the rest of your life, you are going to occasionally have conflicting feelings and you will need to develop a method for determining what is going on. I mean stopping in the middle of a feeling and sitting down on the floor or on a wall or at your desk and asking yourself, with passion, with courage, with commitment to the truth: What is going on? What am I feeling? Am I running away from something? What am I avoiding here? Is there something present in my consciousness that I don’t understand? Is it possible for me to address this thing, whatever it is, this big ball of avoidance and confusion, this big ball of pain, this big ball of black nothingness from which I very much would like to turn away? What is this thing that has appeared before me? What am I looking at?

That’s what you need to do long-term: Interrogate your reluctance, your instinctive turning-away; interrogate with love and acceptance: What is this? Is it fear, is it pain, is it a memory? Is it a picture of your grandparents, is it sadness about possibly losing them, is it guilt about not responding sooner, is it fear of being rebuked or scolded? What is here? What is present? Ask yourself, What can I know about myself that I did not know before? What can I accept, with open arms, that I did not accept before? How can I move forward?

And who can I call next?

This is a great topic for the holidays.

I wish everybody a good whatever you’re having. Enjoy the break from the routine, have some laughs, enjoy your friends and family if possible, and do something you haven’t done before.

And make the call.

Anyway, my grandparents, uncles and father have long since died. I have abandoned any semblance of Christianity — no trees, no Easter eggs for me — and have instead become interested in the religious tradition of my mother’s family. I still have a cousin from my father’s side who lives about 40 minutes from me. Every year, she invites me and my husband and kids over to her place for Christmas Eve. She is one of those highly repressed, chronically nice yet inwardly seething people who always tries to do the right thing and resents the hell out of the world for not appreciating her, but she’s too polite to go on direct attack. I feel she wants to go through the motions of maintaining the myth of family connection, as if that group were less horrible than they really were. She’s a very nice, good person who has been generous with my kids, and is reliable. She’s done a lot of stuff for me over the years, but I never felt like it was for free, thus I don’t feel safe with her emotionally. It doesn’t feel like an emotionally honest relationship. There is a subtext, but I don’t know what it is.

None of us can afford to spend a lot of money on gifts. She can’t, and I can’t. Nobody can. But I am afraid that we will be invited, and my kids will want to go, and I will feel obligated to go over there, even though I am probably not wanted anyway, and we will all give in to the pressure to shop in order to go through the ritual of giving gifts nobody wants or needs.

What is the deal with the competitive gift-giving thing, anyway? In my family of origin, it was supposed to prove that people cared because they couldn’t express caring in any other way but through money or gifts. They couldn’t say anything nice, they couldn’t be affectionate or warm — they were all bundles of grudges, resentment, suspicion, insecurity and bitterness.

Miss Manners would be appalled, so I’m not asking her, I’m asking you: How can I get out of this event? Is there any nice way to say to my cousin, to acknowledge, that none of us can afford to go through this charade? And then just not do it? Because what I wish is that anything anyone would spend on me they would simply take for themselves and buy something they really want and enjoy rather than give me something I don’t need or want and resent me for it. Do you get that receiving anything from anyone in my extended family carries the burden of resentments and unmet needs and accusations? It’s a drag. Why do we keep doing it?

You may wonder why I don’t invite my cousin to my house, which could be an option if my place were not such a dump — broken plumbing, holes in the wall, non-working electricity, a neighborhood eyesore, broken oven, rotting doors, chunks of house falling off, etc. Far from the Better Homes & Gardens image our grandmother lived by. No dining room, no place to sit. I hate the Holiday Season and wish I didn’t have to do this stuff anymore. Frankly, it would not surprise me if she really doesn’t want to do it, either — but how to address the issue? Or just make other plans?

Dreading It

Dear Dreading It,

Here we go again.

I was at Salon’s panel discussion last night about the meaning of the Occupy movement and, more broadly, this moment in our social and political history.

Every now and then what we all know and have been repressing becomes visible. Someone does something and it catches on and things change. It is hard to know when such a moment is at hand.

But certainly now is such a moment. The moment is at hand to make courageous changes both public and private.

It is especially hard to make changes in family practices when there is no larger context for them. One risks being labeled an eccentric or a troublemaker. But when a large social context appears — such as when the feminist movement happened, or during the era of civil rights protests — then individuals in families have an opening. It is as though taboos are lifted and people may speak. That is when we may make changes — particularly when everyone has known the change needed to be made but no one had the courage or the opportunity to speak up.

Your critique of how your family celebrates Christmas is nicely linked to the larger critique of our general economic arrangements. If we can speak of the unfairness of our current system, and its waste and destructiveness, we can also speak of the unfairness of our individual practices, and how wasteful they are. We can do this with a clear conscience. We can do it in context.

It is a time to make changes, some large, some small. These changes may be “political” in certain ways. But what is great about the current moment is that when “political” movements take hold they always touch individual lives in important ways.

One interesting thing about the panel discussion last night was that those of us who have lived through previous social and political movements were able to acknowledge what we learned from those past attempts to change our society. One thing we learned was that a nonhierarchical, consensus-based approach leads to a more durable — if messier — group process.

It was refreshing to consider afterward the wonderful benefits of just leveling with people, of just telling the truth and being heard.

So I hope that in some way this holiday season you can tell the truth to those who matter to you, and that you can be heard, and that you can be yourself and be loved for who you are. My guess is that you are indeed loved for who you are. My guess is that this relative of yours who has invited you over has a real appreciation for you. But, like you, she must struggle to find an “appropriate” way to put her appreciation into practice.

There are many dangers in trying to “fix your family”! But there are ways to simply be present in it, and there are ways to appreciate the flawed but sincere ways that people come together this time of year and try to share what is in their hearts. That is what many people are trying to do, however imperfectly they are doing it.

One idea that comes to mind is for you to give each person an envelope with a personal letter in it; make it a card, as a nod to holiday convention, but put a longer letter in it, too, telling that person the truth about your experience, and inviting that person to confide in you, if he or she wishes, about his or her real experience of the world and of your family.

This could be done quietly.

You might have to give these cards at the end, as you are leaving. Or you might write them in such a way that you are comfortable with each person reading what is in it. If you write what you truly believe and are comfortable with each person reading it — that is, if you refrain from slander and venting — then it might indeed be an empowering act by which you cease this compulsive and harmful thing everyone has been doing for years while acknowledging the universal drive to connect with others at this time of year and celebrate our humanity, such as it is.

Cary, New York City is bringing me down. I broke up with my ex (thankfully with very little emotional scarring), and have found it easy to maintain my close relationship with my brother via Internet and phone — he spends most of his time away at school anyway. I have rarely left the East Coast and have only left the country once, on a trip to Canada that I was too young to remember.

I have been to New York City for every field trip, family outing and special occasion.

Now that I live here I have this constant nagging urge to get out! Go west, north, south and see what else is in this country. I’m young, with nothing tying me down except the need to eat, sleep in a bed and slowly chip away at my student loan debt. I could do this anywhere, even in the service industry, where I am currently employed. Frankly, I could probably do it more easily in another city where the rent isn’t so high.

The problem is my mother. Our parents are long broken up, something she has always had trouble accepting and coping with. The resulting debt from the split and both parents’ unemployment or underemployment since has forced her to sell our house. She will soon be moving into an apartment as she cannot afford even a more modest home. Alimony from my father is not an option, and I am in no position to help her financially.

My mom’s had a rough go of it, and she’s never been able to handle change well. The house, to her, was a symbol of the life she was going to have: housewife to a handsome husband, two kids and a dog in an affluent community. Now, in her mid-50s, she considers her life a failure. She cries all the time. (It’s important to note that while the actual sale of the house is recent, our financial situation/my mother’s mental health has been like this for at least five years.)

I’ve mentioned leaving the East Coast before when I was considering graduate school, and every time she flies off the handle, claiming that I would be snubbing my roots. She’s never lived more than a few miles outside the town I was raised in. I worry that telling her I want to move away will destroy a woman who is already so fragile. It’s just her and the dog now, and she is so lonely. She has friends, but they are all married and well-off. She can’t really afford therapy, but goes occasionally anyway, not that it seems to be helping.

I take on a lot of responsibility in this family. I convinced my mother to sell the house not only to save herself, but to keep my brother in school — he is in a highly respected program that he deserves to be in. I hope to find a job where I can finance some of his education personally. I counsel my mother in most of her major decisions. I am the liaison between my father and every other member of my family. I can do all this from another location, but I fear that it will be viewed by my mother as abandoning her in a difficult time. Is it? I feel so selfish.

Should I put off my desire to a more opportune time? Will there ever be such a time? If I did leave, it wouldn’t be for at least six months, though I doubt she’ll be much happier then. How can I break it to my mother that I want to live a plane ticket away from her — at least for a little while? I’m at a loss.

The Guilty Daughter

Dear Guilty Daughter,

You need to separate yourself from your family and create your own survival mode and identity. This is a real need. It means breaking with your historic role in the family. But it does not mean abandoning your family and giving up the vital role you play.

This real psychic need may express itself to you as a desire to flee and never come back. That is understandable. I have felt that same impulse. However, what you need is a life that keeps you connected to your family while also allowing you to fiercely and wholeheartedly encounter the wild, uncharted nature of the world and of your own soul.

I think you should look for a place in your area that you can call home. But I also think you need to respect this desire to flee. Take it seriously and understand what it is. It is a psychic need. It can be met. You don’t have to abandon your family to meet this need. Paradoxically, having a home will allow you to flee. You can meet your own psychic needs without scorching the landscape of your family connections.

I note that you have strong competing drives. You want to help your brother financially even though you yourself have college loans to pay off. So you have a strong ethic of family responsibility. This is a good thing. It may feel at times that you are being held back by this. But it is a good thing. It is a source of strength. You have an important role in the family. This is not something you want to throw away. Nor is it something that you can fulfill admirably at a distance. You could do the minimum while living far away. But you could not really do what your family needs.

You say you could play the role of liaison from a distance, but in practice this role is going to require your physical presence. Your parents are not doing well in a concrete sense. What they will need is your physical presence. And I do think that being there for your parents is a valuable role for you spiritually. If you abandon that role, further deterioration of the family may result, and you yourself will feel a certain arid emptiness and wonder where it’s coming from. At the same time, I understand how hamstrung it can make you feel to be needed by your parents, how frustrating it can be, and how it can make you feel that you will never, ever, get away to pursue your dreams.

How can you achieve your dreams and meet your psychic need for individuation without moving 3,000 miles away? I see two main tasks. You do need to get away physically, but not 3,000 miles. You do need to get away for a significant period of time but not for years. You can psychically differentiate yourself by having an experience, or series of experiences, that answer your need for a clean break with your past. Such experiences can initiate you into the next phase of your life, which involves independence and self-reliance. This might mean immersion in nature, perhaps in an alien landscape. Perhaps a long sailing trip or an extended stay in the wilderness would provide you with the deeply desired and needed experience of true separation. To experience a different way of surviving, a different way of eating, of making money, of working: This is the way the spirit can satisfy its craving. (You might take a look at the book Nature and the Human Soul. It speaks eloquently about the need for transformative experiences in order to move from one sacred phase to the next.)

At the same time, especially since you have recently lost your family home, in which much was invested and many treasured memories resided, your longing for a home will be strong. You mother sounds like she is suffering great emotional loss. Perhaps you can establish a home midway between Manhattan and the place of your suburban upbringing where she can visit you.

This is long-term thinking. This will provide the best nest for your continued growth as a person. Meanwhile, have fun in Manhattan.

Our true needs sometimes wear disguises. We may think we need to move across the country as a way of expressing who we are. This is the symbolic representation of a need. The real need is to encounter your own wild soul, to be in nature, to individuate yourself and to forge a new mode of living in the world.

This can be done without abandoning your family.

So I suggest that you make yourself a home in the area but plan elaborate and lengthy excursions. Make these excursions that will challenge you spiritually, mentally and physically. Make wild nature a component of them.

That is what I wish for you.